Land Rover Defender 110 rear tailgate open showing Iroko wood flooring and LUCARI Tan leather interior, with show visitors browsing tyre stands in the background.
Events

LUCARI at the game fair

3 August 2026
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Our weekend at the game fair

The Game Fair is one of the UK's biggest country sports events, built around shooting, fishing, gundogs and rural life more broadly, with a proper lineup of outdoor and automotive brands alongside it each year. It's exactly the kind of crowd that already understands classic Defenders without needing it explained, they just haven't necessarily thought about their tyres yet.

We were there for the full run, Friday through to Sunday, on the 4x4 Tyres stand alongside ORE 4x4.

  • LUCARI and 4x4 Tyres team members posing together at The Game Fair event stand, with tyre displays and branded flags behind them.

The team behind it all

We joined this year's Game Fair alongside the team at 4x4 Tyres, who'd fitted our Defender 110 Soft Top with a set of Falken tyres for the weekend. It's the kind of pairing that works well on a stand. A showstopper soft top stops people walking past, and once they're standing next to it, a proper conversation about wheels and tyres is a much easier thing to have than it is over a website.

Leo and Tom held the stand on Friday, then Steve joined Leo for Saturday and Sunday. Three days, a lot of coffee and, by Sunday afternoon, a fairly encyclopaedic shared knowledge of who'd asked what.

A good part of the weekend was existing customers finding us on the stand rather than the other way round. Someone we'd built an interior for eighteen months ago, stopping to say hello and have a look at the tyres. That happens more at events like this than people might expect, and it's one of the better reasons to keep turning up to them.

  • LUCARI Black Olive Green Land Rover Defender 110 parked at The Game Fair alongside two LUCARI team members near the 4x4 Tyres exhibition stand.

The vehicle stopping people in their tracks

We've found that a soft top does something a hard top doesn't at events like this. It shows the arches, the ride height and the tyre profile all at once, which is exactly what people are trying to picture when they're asking about wheel and tyre choice for their own vehicle. On a hard top, a lot of that detail is hidden or has to be explained. On a soft top, it's just there to look at.

It also meant we could talk honestly about fitment. Not every wheel and tyre combination that looks right in a photo actually clears a Defender's arch without rubbing, particularly once you've made any changes to ride height or wheel offset. Having the vehicle there to point at made that a more insightful conversation than usual.

  • LUCARI team member and influencer The Little Green Defender standing in front of a Defender 110 at The Game Fair on an event stand, the woman wearing a white dress and sun hat.

Wheels & tyres for Defenders

Interestingly, the tyre conversation split fairly cleanly into two camps. Daily drivers wanted to know about ride comfort, road noise and how much a more aggressive tread pattern would cost them in wear over motorway miles. The green laning and rough stuff crowd wanted sidewall strength and puncture resistance, and were generally far less bothered about noise.

Having the team from 4x4 Tyres on hand made this easy, because it's genuinely two different sets of priorities and there's no single right answer. One thing that surprises people is how much a tyre choice interacts with everything else on the vehicle, wheel width, offset and even how the vehicle's used week to week, rather than being a decision you can make on its own.

It's easy to assume a bigger, chunkier tyre is always the safer choice on a classic Defender. Not everyone agrees with that, and we'd say it depends entirely on what the vehicle actually does most weeks.

  • Two LUCARI team members taking a selfie in front of a LUCARI rebuilt Land Rover Defender 110 at The Game Fair, with a marquee tent and 4x4 Tyres stand in the background.

A big thank you to the 4x4 Tyres team

A huge thank you for having us! Having wheel and tyre specialists standing next to us made it far easier to give people a proper answer rather than a guess, whatever they were planning to use their Defender for.

You can see all the behind-the-scenes from the event on our TikTok profile.

If the weekend's left you thinking about your own Defender, whether that's a Defender soft top conversion, a complete interior build or you just want to talk through wheel and tyre options, get in touch with the team at our fitting centre in Rye, East Sussex.